Caute

Catching things

Catching is saving something to Caute. You never have to give it a title, a tag or a place: it lands in your private inbox, and you can organise it later or not at all.

The timeline's box

The box at the top of your timeline at https://app.getcaute.com catches as well as narrows.

  • A link: paste or type a web address and press Enter. Caute saves the page.
  • A thought: type anything, then choose Catch or press ⌘ Enter (Ctrl Enter on Windows). Add #tags as you type.
  • A picture or file: paste it straight into the box.

Pressing Enter on words that aren't a link narrows the timeline instead of saving them.

Dropping and uploading files

Drag a file onto any page in Caute and let go when you see "Drop to save". You can drop several at once.

Caute reads:

  • PDFs, including scanned ones, whose text it reads from the page images
  • Word, Excel and PowerPoint files, and Pages, Numbers and Keynote files
  • photos and other images, reading any writing in them
  • audio and video, which are transcribed
  • EPUB books, Markdown, plain text, CSV and HTML files
  • calendar invites and contact cards
  • zip files, whose contents are caught one by one

A file Caute can't read, such as one that is password-protected or damaged, is still kept. It appears in Needs attention with the reason.

The browser extension

The extension for Chrome, Firefox and Safari catches a page as you see it, including pages you're signed in to, as well as selections, links and images. See The browser extension.

On your iPhone and Mac

On iPhone, choose Caute in any app's Share sheet. On the Mac, choose Caute from any app's Share menu, or use the Caute menu bar app to catch a thought, the clipboard or files you drop on its icon. Both keep what you catch with no signal and send it once you're back online. See iPhone and Mac.

On Android

Caute installs from Chrome on Android as an app on your home screen:

  1. Open https://app.getcaute.com in Chrome and sign in.
  2. Open Chrome's menu (⋮) and choose Add to Home screen.

Caute then appears in your phone's Share menu. Whatever you share to it, a page, a PDF or a photo, is caught into your inbox with no more taps.

Email

You can make private addresses that put mail into your library. Forward anything to one and it lands in the space you chose, attachments and all. Each attachment becomes its own card, linked to the email.

  1. Go to Settings → Email in at https://app.getcaute.com/settings/email.
  2. Optionally say what the address is for (like Receipts) and where its mail should land. The default is your private inbox.
  3. Choose Make an address, then Copy to copy it.

Rotate gives you a new address and stops accepting mail to the old one. Revoke turns an address off.

Adding a plus and a word to the address, such as yourcode+taxes@in.getcaute.com, tags the email with that word.

Senders you trust. Mail from the address you sign in with is always trusted. Mail from anyone else is held in Needs attention, where you can choose Save this one or Always trust this sender. Caute never replies to an address it doesn't know. The senders you trust are listed on the same page, and Forget removes one.

Newsletters have their own address in the Feed, so they stay apart from your library until you keep an issue.

Importing from another tool

Go to Settings → Import a library at https://app.getcaute.com/settings/import. Each tool has its own button and a note on where to find its export. You can import from:

  • Pocket, Instapaper and Raindrop (a CSV file)
  • Omnivore (its zip, with the copies of pages it kept, and your highlights and notes)
  • Readwise (a CSV file; each book or article becomes a note of its highlights)
  • Kindle (the My Clippings.txt file from your Kindle)
  • Markdown or Obsidian (zip the folder; links between notes become links in Caute)
  • Browser bookmarks from Chrome, Firefox or Safari (an HTML file)
  • Feeds from a feed reader (an OPML file), which Caute then follows in your Feed

Each saved link is read as if you had caught it, with its original date, your tags and folders, privately in your inbox. Importing the same file again adds nothing twice. When an import finishes, See what was imported shows just those cards. Pages that couldn't be loaded are kept as links, and Show them lists them.

Assistants

An AI assistant you connect can save things to Caute too, if you allow it. See Assistants.

What happens after you catch something

The words you caught, or a page's address and title, can be found by keyword within about a second. Caute then reads the rest in the background: the page's text, the words in a scan or photo, a recording's transcript. Once that's done, the card can be found by meaning as well.

If something can't be read, it's never dropped quietly. Needs attention appears in the bar at the top whenever something is waiting there, each with one thing to do: Try again, or for a page a site wouldn't give Caute, Open the page so you can catch it from your browser.

If you catch a page or file you've already saved, Caute says so and doesn't save it twice.